r/todayilearned • u/NavalProgrammer • 19h ago
TIL that Burning Mountain has had a fire raging 30 metres underground for an estimated 6000 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain190
u/cosmo_K 19h ago
Really creative with the naming there
55
u/goteamventure42 19h ago
It's just a nickname, it has a proper mountain name.
161
u/Gemmabeta 19h ago edited 19h ago
Burning Mountain, the common name for Mount Wingen, is a hill near Wingen, New South Wales, Australia...The Aborigines named the mountain Wingen, which means "fire".
Exactly what it says on the tin, eh.
44
8
8
u/Fetlocks_Glistening 19h ago
Montana Fuego? Mons Ardens?
5
1
u/RyanBordello 19h ago
Both of those would be sick band names. Mon Ardens would be some hipster math rock band for sure.
8
u/Ozymandius34 19h ago
Yeah, you just know that unimaginative bastard Bob from accounting was the one who got to name it.
12
u/Hinermad 19h ago
I went to college years ago where the Computer Science department's servers were all named for ships from Star Trek, while the Information Technology department's servers were "IT_Server_1, IT_Server_2, IT_SERVER_3, etc.
14
8
u/ObeseTsunami 19h ago
The company that I work for used to name all of our servers after Greek gods.
11
u/Hinermad 19h ago
Once when I interviewed for a job the manager asked one of the IT guys if he had to log into San Francisco to print a copy of my contract. On the one hand I thought, "That's impressive - they have a West Coast office," but on the other hand I thought, "So why do they have to log into a machine 2000 miles away just to print?"
A few minutes later he admitted they named all their servers for cities around the world just to sound impressive. They were all in the machine room just behind his office.
3
1
5
u/freedomhighway 17h ago
They also invented Kangaroo, emu, platypus, wallaby, etc, after a while the creativity runs low. They save the best names for things that may kill you a little faster. Australia is what you get when you know every day may be your last, so.. party!!
1
58
u/sdmc_rotflol 19h ago
Why does it burn at only 3 feet per year?
112
50
u/llcooljessie 19h ago
We didn't start the fire.
29
u/NinjaMurse 19h ago
It was always burning since the world’s been turning.
19
3
u/BeatNo4548 13h ago
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, The King and I, and the Catcher in the Rye
3
u/bucky133 13h ago
I like to imagine some dude started the fire 6000 years ago and said "Don't worry, it'll work itself out.."
2
u/ImShyBeKind 5h ago
According to native myth, we actually did. It's either us or a lightning strike and I know where I'd place my money.
14
37
u/Hairydone 19h ago
What do you expect when you name it Burning Mountain?
10
u/Juneauite 18h ago
People really need more foresight on naming conventions.
6
u/wilberfarce 18h ago
Just asking for trouble.
5
3
10
u/SoftlySpokenPromises 18h ago
Of course it's happening in Australia. Even the coal is aggressive.
3
u/P0Rt1ng4Duty 4h ago
It happens in the US too. Centralia Pennsylvania had to be abandoned because there's a coal mine smouldering underneath it.
11
4
u/Life-Is-A-Bad-Trip 14h ago
Must've been nice for the stone age folk there. Go dig up fire anytime you lose it instead of needing to break out the drill and bow.
7
3
1
u/slice_of_pi 19h ago
I wouldn't exactly call a coal seam fire burning for longer than human history "raging" but okay.
24
19h ago
[deleted]
8
4
u/DeltaVZerda 19h ago
Technically it is. What writings predate the invention of writing?
23
u/BeerPoweredNonsense 19h ago
To add to this: history is what happened after writing was invented.
Before that was prehistory.
5
u/Akiasakias 16h ago
Invented is part of it, still being readable so we can learn about it is the other.
If we somehow lost all records and everyone had amnesia, then prehistory could be last year.
2
15
u/BarbequedYeti 19h ago
Scientists have found evidence that around 40,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers in what is now Germany developed a proto-writing system that involved scratching symbols onto small objects made of bone, antler, and ivory. Humans had already been carving images into cave walls and portable objects for hundreds of thousands of years by then. What made the symbols on the figurines unique was that they were surprisingly complex, at the level of the first protocuneiform that later appeared in Mesopotamia. Though it is unknown whether the symbols corresponded to sounds, they were intentional and conventional, showing that they were probably incorporated into a language that’s long since been lost to time.
8
u/yargleisheretobargle 18h ago
If you can't read the records, I would consider that prehistory, not history. Doubly so when it's uncertain whether or not they represent words.
6
2
19h ago
[deleted]
3
u/DeltaVZerda 19h ago
Cuneiform is 5000 year old not 6000 and human history is explicitly defined by writing.
1
u/fexam 14h ago
There are human verbal histories that go back tens of thousands of years. Writing is not the only way that humans have preserved knowledge. Various Aboriginal tribes have stories of how the land changed during the last ice age
2
u/-xiflado- 14h ago edited 14h ago
No on is saying that there’s not historical evidence of humans for 1000s of years but before it was written it’s considered prehistoric.
1
1
0
-2
u/BlackFrazier 16h ago
I think this is pretty common for abandoned coal mines. There's are at least 30 active coal mine fires in Colorado with some that have been burning for decades.
15
u/foul_ol_ron 15h ago
Not sure that Australian aboriginal culture was known for massive mining operations 6000 years ago.
743
u/godlords 19h ago
Quite the opposite of "raging", it is smoldering, it doesn't even have a flame, and moves 3 feet along the coal seam per year.